"I am not advocating a morality based on evolution"
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1975

Can a Darwinian view of human nature
tell us how we ought to live?

Author Richard Dawkins believes that humans alone, of all species,
have the capacity to rebel against their genes, to 'upset their designs'.

Yet Dawkins' own
work helped to pave the way for the development of evolutionary psychology;
and in the 1990s, philosophers, social scientists, legal theorists and
others have begun to advocate a
morality
based on evolution.

Delving into the
digital realm, researchers are now creating sophisticated virtual
organisms-
software programs which can grow and evolve. And they're using these
digital beings to simulate the way in which certain kinds of moral behaviour
evolved in us humans. Electronic organisms are being made to make 'moral'
choices - choices which can influence their chances of surviving and
replicating.

These developments raise some fascinating and uncomfortable dilemmas.
For example, would it be possible to arrive at a calculation of the
'correct' moral choice in any given situation by simulating the outcome
on a computer?

Might we, as a society, choose to delegate choices to artificial
moral intelligences that we find too difficult or too politically
sensitive - such as the allocation of health spending to intensive antenatal
care versus aged care.

If a virtual organism is capable of making moral
choices - something philosophers have argued is fundamental
to our humanity - does such an organism acquire the same rights and
responsibilities as a human being? Can a machine have rights?

Are such artificial intelligences the
next stage of evolution - destined to supersede humans?